Wednesday, December 30, 2009

The Billionaire's Vinegar: The Mystery of the World's Most Expensive Bottle of Wine by Benjamin Wallace

★★★★½

A very enjoyable read. The author writes with wit! Surprisingly, a real page-turner.

The book may have been more interesting to me than it might have been because I read it on the heals of Wine and War, so some wine-related names and places and terminology were recently familiar. Also, I was coincidentally in the middle of watching the HBO mini-series John Adams, which was giving me my first impressions of Thomas Jefferson in France.

A fascinating window into the world of wine; downright edifying. The book digs into the questionable history of a handful of bottles of rare wines, some of which were supposedly owned by Thomas Jefferson. My only disappointment - and this may be a bit of a spoiler - is that there is no real closure. But I don't think that's the author's fault; he follows the story to 2007, the book was published in 2008, and some of the final scenes are probably still being played out.

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